James Gee's Literacy: Secondary Discourse

James Gee (19--) challenged the reading profession to think more broadly about reading instruction when he wrote, “’Literacy’ is the mastery or fluent control over a secondary Discourse” (p. 9). As social beings, people belong to a variety of Discourse groups, groups that have very specific identities and “ways of being in the world” (Gee, 19--, p. 6). Our primary Discourse group is that of our home. As our world expands, so do our Discourse groups. According to Gee, these secondary Discourse groups have particular way of thinking, speaking, acting, valuing, believing, and understanding that are unique to that group. Newcomers to these secondary Discourse groups are enculturated by the group. In keeping with a socioconstructivist perspective,
Contemporary life can be dichotomized into simple domains of activity, including home, school, and work place. There are distinct literacy practices that take place inside these domains and certainly, distinct ways of thinking, feeling, valuing, using and understanding these literacy practices (cf. Street, 1995; Heath, 1983; Barton & Hamilton, 2000). The home is often identified as the primary domain in people’s lives, for this is the first place socialization occurs (Gee, 1990). Relationships and resources are often structured very differently in work-place domains (as well as school domains) than they are in the home. Such varying practices suggest that people participate in various discourse communities (Gee, 1990) in the varying domains of life. These communities are groups of people who are held together by their characteristic beliefs about literacy and common understanding, valuing, interpreting, and uses of literacy (cf. Gee, 200-) as well as how it is learned (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Heath, 1983). Different domains create, structure and support particular literacies within each domain (cf. Wilson, 2000; White, 1985). The discourse within these domains either recognize events as part of the way of "being in the world" (Gee) within the domain, in as much as it matches the practice of the domain. What is meant by literacy varies from situation to situation and is dependent on ideology
Literacy is not only represented by the texts in the environment, how those texts came to be, who is using them, and how they are being used, but is also represented by the feelings, beliefs, and attitudes about those texts by the members of that community (Barton, 1994). Included in these unobservable aspects of literacy practices are the mental construction, sense-making, purpose-setting, and valuing that goes on inside the head that is also defining of literacy practices. Namely, the ways in which people think about literacy, their awareness of it, their constructions of it, how they talk about it, and how they make sense of it are all indicative of the literacy practices of a society. The conceptions people hold about the reading and writing process as they are engaged in literacy events is just as important as the event itself (Barton,